Sunday, 27 July 2014

As many of you will know, I am a great partisan of, as the
song has it, “Saint Mirren from Pais-a-lee”.

About fifteen, indeed on reflection more like twenty, years
ago, our great rivals, Greenock Morton,
were threatened with going out of business. Some cowboy, whose details now have
faded in my memory, had gained a significant shareholding in the Greenock Club
and was threatening to put them down so that he could sell off Crappielow (as
we in Paisley know it) for redevelopment.

Anyway, this was an eventuality we Saints could not
contemplate. So a “friendly” St Mirren against Morton match was arranged at the
self same stadium to raise funds for those trying to save the Greenock side.

I went with one of my nephews who was just reaching the age
that he was not prepared to do something without at least some rationale being
given. So as we drove down the M8 I was subject to some interrogation.

“Why are we going to this?”

“To try to help save the Morton”

“But we hate the Morton, don’t we?”

“Of course we do, but we wouldn’t want to see them going out
of business.”

“It wouldn’t be the same. Anyway, it is Ayr United who hate
Kilmarnock. St Mirren hate Morton. That is the natural order of things.”

“Why?”

“Look, stop asking silly questions. It just is.”

As history now records, Morton were saved and, as a result, still,
on the darkest of February Saturdays, as Saints fans troop out of New Greenhill Road even after the
most miserable of defeats, our fans will fall silent as one particular result from the lower leagues is announced over the
Tannoy. And if Morton have lost as well we will muster a ragged cheer and
console ourselves that the day could have been worse.

Sporting rivalries are in the very nature of Team sports.
And in their pursuit much heat can be generated. In the real world, nobody from
Paisley thinks the “soapdodgers” from Greenock have a problem with their personal
hygiene, any more than those from the Arse of the Bank truly believe the entire
population of my own home town are addicted to Heroin.Mind you, these are surely mild insults
compared to the revelation, as Tim parks reported in his book about Italian
football followers, that the supporters
of Hellas Verona refer to their rivals from Vicenza as mangi gatti (cat eaters) in
memory of a Sixteenth Century siege during which the residents of that latter
city were indeed reduced to that sad condition.

But it is a mistake to assume that sporting rivalry has a
wider resonance.I readily confess to
being in the “anybody but England” camp when it comes to team sports. Earlier
today, while watching the Rugby Sevens, I discovered, alongside many other Scots I
suspect, a previously unrecognised enthusiasm
for Samoa.So what? That is hardly the
basis for a system of Government. And anybody who does surely needs to have a
long think about themselves.

And anyway, team sports are quite different from individual
events. Whoever a great athlete competes for in an individual contest, I am
happy to give them my support. I might choose a favourite and I readily
recognise that one reason for greater favouritism might be greater familiarity with
one competitor over another . But the idea
that i would be hostile to any competitor because of their nationality seems to
me to be bizarre. And for what it is
worth I believe that is a sentiment shared by the great mass of the population,
whether dedicated sports watchers or otherwise.

Yet in their belief that the Commonwealth Games might
represent a change in their fortunes the Nationalists seem to have ignored this
relatively obvious observation.

To support Scotland and Scottish competitors comes naturally
to all of us who live here because we are, or at least become, familiar with
them. Even if they are from Greenock.

I am as surprised and pleased as anybody to learn that we
appear to be some sort of Commonwealth superpower when it comes to Judo. I say
that even while being less than clear while watching it who is winning and why.
But it has surely nothing to do with Scottish Independence to be enthusiastic
about Scotland, or Scottish competitors, in a sporting context. As with so much
else, it is also necessary to be antipathetic to England. And to believe anyway that what happens in the
sporting field,particularly in the “Friendly
Games”, is capable of having any
political significance.

I have no idea what the Nats expected here. That Greg
Rutherford or Laura Trott or Nicola Adams would found themselves booed as bearing
the hated colours of our oppressors? Really?

Well, if they did they are as deluded as they appear to be
about everything else.

Indeed, I suspect that if the Games have any impact at all
on the Referendum it will be the exact opposite of Nationalist hopes. The Games have brought an awfullot of English people to Scotland. And
contrary to Nationalist stereotype they have not spent their time here treating
the local population with little concealed disdain while talking loudly in
upmarket hotels about their indifference to the poor. Rather they have proved
to be remarkably like.....us.

Except perhaps that when it came to the Rugby sevens they
did not share our enthusiasm for Samoa.

Saturday, 19 July 2014

I am not the greatest fan of Bernard Ponsonby but just over
a month back he observed that those who believed that the Independence
Referendum would dominate the public
discourse in Scotland between now and 18th September did nor
appreciate the impact of the World Cup.

He was right.

By virtue of the Summer break I saw the World Cup in three
different Countries. Or, if you prefer one view of Scotland’s status, four
different countries.

Having left my own Country/Countries after the group stage,
I saw the round of 16 and most of the quarter finals while with Andi’s family
in Hungary. I then saw both the semis and the final itself in Italy.

The final I saw on a big screen in a square in Rome in the
company of the citizens of many nations but most prominently, and
understandably, of those of Germany and Argentina.

Sportingly, there was no love lost. Afterwards the Germans
drank (even) more publicly in celebration while the Argentinians drank (even more still I
suspect) privately in grief. But during the event
there was a strange kind of love. Love of “il calcio” certainly but also love
of an event that could bring so many nations together in a moment of mutual
interest in ninety or, as it transpired, one hundred and twenty minutes.

For the World Cup probably sums up more than any other event
that the world is shrinking. That German fans would be as well informed of the constant
diligence of Mascherano or the faltering form of Messi as the Argentinians were
of the fortuitous absence of Khedeira or the potential danger of
underestimating the German’s one extra rest day if the game went to extra time.

And when Klose was taken off for the last time in a World
Cup, it wasn't just everyone in the stadium who applauded his final departure
from the field, it was everyone in that square in Rome. And I suspect everyone
in hundreds, thousands, of similar locations across the world.

The next day I was home.

To a country where, in the aftermath of the world coming
together, some still seemed anachronistically determined to see reasons for
putting us all once again apart.

Except that for all Bernard claimed that nothing would
change during the World Cup something seemed subtly to have changed. The
Nationalists had realised they were going to get beat. And that this was all
the fault of the electorate.

I could cite any number of such pieces from the press or the blogosphere but they
all share common themes. A bitterness towards the people of Scotland. Somehow
we are not worthy of all the poems written and faces painted in the cause of
“freedom”. Surely any true patriot would
be unconcerned with the economic technicalities? That they would if necessary be prepared
to starve for their flag? Self determination is a wonderful thing but only if
it is exercised in a particular way. Class politics must, at least for the
moment, step aside in the interests of “the nation”. Most bizarrely of all, that
after 18th September, the SNP will enjoy a benefit from losing while
the Labour Party will pay a price for winning.

For prominent examples over the last few
days you need only look to Joyce McMillan in Friday’s Scotsman, Neil
Ascherson in today’s New York Times or Stehen Maxwell in the New Syatesman. Perhaps at its most grande guignol, this piece by Peter Arnott in Bella Caledonia.

Well.

There are two iron rules of democracy. The first is that
when the voters have spoken, the voters have spoken. And the second? That the
voters are always right.

I have written before about the parallels between Yes
Scotland and the Labour Party of the early eighties. Then, even more fully packed and self satisfied rooms of
the same people on different, sometimes every, night of the week wore different hats and
titles as the occasion demanded. The platform on a Tuesday, the audience on a
Wednesday, the Committee on a Thursday. Convincing themselves of their own certainty
while the wider public looked on askance. Initially with disinterest and then,
as that public inreasingly found themselves accused of lacking appropriate sympathetic
zeal, with ever more certainty that those so fanatically engaged with politics
were not quite "like them".

Yet, as the prospect of inevitable defeat sinks in it seems
to me that the Nationalists have learned nothing from that earlier political
period. Post 1983 there was a brief fashion for badges bearing the message
“Don’t blame me, I voted Labour”. It certainly allowed us (and I readily
concede I was one of “us”) a degree of comfort but as to persuading those who
had not voted Labour? That accusing them of stupidity or, worse still, personal
responsibility for what then followed was unlikely to win them over? That
lesson took a longer time to learn. Arguably a full further fourteen years.

That wiser heads in the SNP have not always had an eye to at
least the possibility of defeat is almost inconceivable but whether they will
learn from it what they might need to survive; an acceptance of the result and
an avowed determination to get on with the proper governance of Scotland for
the next eighteen months? That is more difficult to call.